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Outsmarting Fraudsters: Do You Have Modern Critical Capabilities to Prevail?

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Published October 17, 2023

Online fraud remains a significant financial burden for businesses, resulting in billions of dollars in annual revenue losses and reputation damage. To defend against the proliferation of evolving attacks, and protect ever-expanding attack surfaces, organizations must constantly advance the integration of their security and fraud teams and leverage multiple data sources, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) detection, and data analytics to proactively detect and mitigate fraud in real time.

KuppingerCole's Fraud Reduction Intelligence Platform report highlights the critical functionality effective fraud prevention platforms must possess, including credential stuffing intelligence, device intelligence, bot detection and management, behavioral analytics, and behavioral/passive biometrics. F5’s Distributed Cloud bot and fraud platform solutions were assessed and received an overall, product, market, and innovation leadership position, signifying F5’s exceptional performance in offering security and online fraud detection capabilities that counteract even the most sophisticated fraudulent activities.

F5 Assessment Areas and Results from the Report

Critical Fraud Prevention Capabilities

When defining your online fraud strategy be sure to develop a cross-functional team that allows for collaboration and sharing of insights that enable fraud detection early in the attack cycle before harm is done. Acknowledge that account takeover and fraudulent account opening are often due to security problems. Solutions that provide the capabilities listed below will offer the best defense. 

Bot Detection and Management

Automated bots are an evasive threat in today’s digital landscape. According to the report, “bot detection and management have become more central to deterring many types of fraud attempts, since many forms of fraud are automated by bots.”  

According to the report Distributed Cloud Bot Defense is “a sophisticated bot detection and management solution” providing customers the ability to defend against bots attempting to conduct inventory checking/hoarding, price checking/scraping, carding, policy abuse, refund abuse, and unauthorized ticket reselling. Distributed Cloud Bot Defense leverages behavioral biometrics and device intelligence to decipher between human vs. automated activity and blocks automated attacks to safeguard applications.

Device Intelligence

Device intelligence, such as device hygiene, history and reputation, browser anomalies, login patterns, location history, and IP reputation, can be key to detecting fraudulent activities. Uncharacteristic patterns detected are often signs of potential fraud. 

F5’s Distributed Cloud Data Intelligence is a cloud-based curated data service that collects device intelligence along with behavioral and network data in real time to detect and mitigate account takeover (ATO), account opening (AO) fraud, and other types of security risks and cyber fraud. Seamlessly integrate Distributed Cloud Data Intelligence with existing fraud and security ecosystems, existing processes and procedures, and existing staff skill sets to empower stakeholders with high-fidelity, actionable intelligence to better detect and mitigate fraud. 

Credential Intelligence

Credential intelligence looks at information about prior usage of digital credentials to answer questions such as “is this credential known to have been recently compromised?” or “has this credential been used for fraud at other sites?” Credential theft and monetization of credentials lead to fraud, lost revenue, and customer abandonment.

Credential intelligence can also help detect when leaked credentials are being leveraged by attackers to launch account takeover attacks or steal critical personal data from users’ accounts. F5 Distributed Cloud bot and fraud solutions defeat credential stuffing attacks at multiple levels by stopping the use of leaked credentials. To learn more about credential stuffing attacks that lead to account takeover, read the F5 eBookCredential Stuffing 2022: The Latest Attack Trends and Tools.

Behavioral Biometrics

Fraudulent intent can be detected by analyzing users’ physical interactions with devices and comparing those activities against prior interactions. This is typically achieved by installing JavaScript to capture information such as mouse movements, keyboard usage patterns, and any unusual interactions. 

F5’s Distributed Cloud Account Protection leverages behavioral biometrics and user behavior analysis to identify account takeover attempts, even if attackers have valid credentials. Powered by a closed-loop AI engine and large-scale unified telemetry built on over a billion transactions per day, Distributed Cloud Account Protection monitors transactions in real time across the entire user journey. Using advanced signal collection, as well as behavioral and environmental insights, the platform uniquely determines user intent, accurately detecting malicious activity and delivering high fraud detection rates. The AI engine provides a single high-fidelity, real-time outcome while adaptive ML provides fast retraining and continuous enhanced detection.

User Behavioral Analysis (UBA)

UBA is another capability highlighted as a critical requirement for effective fraud detection. It is used to examine past user activities to determine if the current login attempt or transaction request is within normal parameters. For example, UBA assesses request origination environmental attributes such as IP, geo-location, and cyber threat intelligence.

F5’s Distributed Cloud Authentication Intelligence improves the accuracy of authentication by assessing user behavior and device attributes. It improves customer security and reduces fraud and friction to increase revenue and customer loyalty.

Conclusion

As online fraud continues to pose a significant threat to businesses and consumers, the role of fraud reduction intelligence platforms becomes essential to detect and mitigate cyberattacks that lead to fraud. The KuppingerCole Fraud Reduction Intelligent Platforms report is a valuable tool for organizations looking to understand the fraud detection market, the leading fraud reduction solution providers, and the critical capabilities you need to outsmart today’s sophisticated fraudsters.

F5’s integrated bot, fraud, and risk solutions bring security and fraud teams together with data, AI, and machine learning to quickly analyze malicious activity to detect and mitigate fraud while ensuring seamless user experiences. Being recognized as an overall, product, market, and innovation leader in the KuppingerCole report is a true testament to the value of F5’s bot, fraud, and risk offerings.

Find Out How F5 Can Help You on Your Fraud Detection Journey

To help organizations identify how fraudsters are targeting their applications with bots and the impact bots are having on the business, F5 offers a Free Threat Assessment, as well as a free, comprehensive bot management and business impact ROI consulting session that utilizes a modeling tool to determine the projected economic impact bots are having on the business and highlights how increased customer retention can be achieved with effective bot management.